My 412+ is setup as a simple JBOD so all 4 drives are grouped as one volume. One of the 4 drives is having issues, so the NAS is beeping at me with a volume failure message. Three other drives are healthy according to the NAS. All files are backed up on other drives so no worries there. If I replace drive 4 will I have access to the volume again (minus any files that were on drive 4) or will I have to setup a new volume and upload all the files again?
Hi @radioclash,
Unfortunately, based on how you described your setup, you will not be able to replace a single drive without losing the volume. Typical JBOD configuration spreads a fileās data across all the drives in the volume without any additional information added on how to reconstruct that data should one drive fail. As a result, a single drive failure, or removing one drive from the volume will break the whole volume in an irrecoverable manner.
Make sure you have a good backup of all the data and rebuild from scratch.
When you rebuild, Synology has an interesting technology called Synology Hybrid Raid that allows you to build a recoverable RAID array using dissimilar drives. This can be used if all the drives are the same or different. I recommend when you rebuild your volume that you investigate building it as an SHR.
Good luck!
4 Likes
Thank you, I had a feeling it wouldnāt be that easy 
Thank you for the help!
RAID 5 or whatever proprietary RAID 5 equivelent your equipment has is the way anyone should set up a NASā¦ (and as a backup store for family PCs) ā¦only downside is writes can be slower but this is not an issue for serving files like from a music archive. Oh, and you need more disk space for the same amount as the disks now have to store redundant data across them.
I use a Netgear NAS and have no complaintsā¦ When you hot swap a failing driveā¦ I was getting alerts on one of the disksā¦ the issue for the Netgear was it took days and days for the RAID to be re-built. You can simply pull the bad drive, insert the new, all without powering down or doing anything elseā¦ thus āhot swapā. The unit then starts the rebuilding processā¦ and this took forever for about 4.5 terabytes of dataā¦ I have four drives in my NAS.
Overall, I am happy with my NASā¦ and I recommend this for those with big librariesā¦ but they do have their downsides but not much.
Peace
Bruce in Philly
1 Like